Powering the Future

Power the Future: One hundred and twenty students. Twenty-four hours. One Dominion Energy.

Recently, Dominion Energy partnered with Virginia Commonwealth University for “Power the Future,” a twenty-four hour design-a-thon. The challenge brought together students from across the United States to test their problem solving skills and collaboration while designing an innovative solution.

The students were shown a short video with a simple call to action: design a technological solution for Dominion Energy. The purpose of the solution was then entirely up to the students to decide, and then create.

Over fifty Dominion Energy employees helped in various ways throughout the past year, including the thirty-five who were present at the event itself. These employees – from branding teams to information technology specialists – were able to help the students along the way throughout the challenge. The students and employees were able to teach and learn from each other under the same common goal. Additionally, Human Resources was present to locate and engage with top talent from the event for potential new hires and intern candidates.

After twenty-four hours of brainstorming, designing, and building nearly complete prototypes, the teams were then judged by Dominion Energy employees in a science fair format. To determine the most innovative and valuable solutions, the top teams then went to a second round of “Shark Tank” style judging with Dominion Energy executives.

The winning team created an app that enables customers to report an outage, monitor energy usage and take steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

Power the Future was part of the fall 2019 season of Major League Hacks, which organizes student hackathons throughout the country. This event was the first corporate-sponsored event in the history of Major League Hacking, which not only allowed the students to work with each other, but also with Dominion Energy employees and executives to create real business value.

Dominion Energy volunteers greet students at the Power the Future event.